About Me

21.11.06

I have been working in Europe recently and was facing a difficulty in following things in Dutch. Was using sites like Free Translation for my basic day to day activities. But just today morning was reading TechCrunch and I saw that a website Cucumis was covered.

TechCrunch says, "It is a community site for people who speak at least two languages and want to trade translation services. Translate text to earn points, then spend the points to have text translated into one of 22 languages. As a user’s reputation grows they earn “expert” status and receive more points for translations. The service itself is free, and Cucumis is a one-man project."

I went ahead and registered myself and played around a little with the web site. Definitely agree that the site is not very well designed and needs a lot of rework etc. But well that is not he objective my post here.

This is definitely useful service and I can think of quite a few ways of getting this network to generate revenues

1. If people can buy points and use that to have their requirements translated - the site owners can make money2. Can translators 'bid' for translations and the site owners can make money as an intermediary3. If the strength of the network grows fast enough, and the statistics suggest rate of match between a translator and translated as high enough some real time services like the mTranslator can be thought off (read my blog on this here)4. People who know some language combinations might be tougher to find and so those combinations might be charged and not free as it is currently